“Are you tracking the destroyer?”
“No. Give me a second to find it. You should have brought a second sonar expert if you wanted to hear every note of this symphony!”
Jake stepped across the tiny room and crouched beside Remy. He grabbed a spare headset and pressed one of its muffs against his ear.
“You track the destroyer,” he said. “Get me a targeting solution to break it in half. I’ll listen for the other shit out there.”
“I’m afraid you’re not good enough to listen for the other shit out there, as you call it.”
“Trust me.”
“On all other matters, yes. On this, not so much.”
“Just find me that destroyer.”
“I see that I have no choice.”
The sonar expert shrugged, pressed his muffs against his head, and curled forward.
“I have it,” he said.
He tapped his screen and assigned an acoustic line of bearing to the clean frequency of the destroyer’s screws.
“The solution is ready,” he said.
Jake turned to Durand.
“Assign tubes one and two to the destroyer.”
“Tubes one and two are assigned,” Durand said.
“Henri, are you ready to shoot tubes one and two?”
“Ready!”
“Shoot tube one!”
Whining and ear popping preceding Henri’s confirmation that he controlled the unleashed weapon.
“Shoot tube two!” Jake said.
After confirmation of the second weapon’s control, it joined the first in racing towards the destroyer, but Jake wanted more.
“Durand, assign tube three to a phantom target twenty degrees to the left of the destroyer, same distance, course, and speed as the destroyer.”
The young sailor looked at Jake for a quizzical moment, but then he processed the command and tapped keys.
“Tube three is assigned to a phantom target twenty degrees left of the destroyer, same distance, course, and speed.”
Jake looked to Henri.
“You ready?”
“Ready!”
“Shoot tube three!”
His ears popped, and he yawned once again to relieve the pressure. A glance at Durand showed a young face, eager to comply.
“Now do it for tube four,” Jake said. “Except this time, do it twenty degrees to the right.”
“Tube four is assigned to a phantom target twenty degrees right of the destroyer, same distance, course, and speed.”
With the fourth weapon seeking the boxed-in destroyer that sprinted into his oncoming weapons, Jake considered his mission to be minutes from completion. But with his hand pressing the sounds of the ocean against his ear, he discerned something that sent his adrenal glands into overdrive.
He looked at Remy, whose body curled in consuming focus, and he knew better than to interrupt him. To confirm his fears without his sonar guru’s help, he listened to a cacophony of rhythmic, whining shrillness.
In his gut, he knew what was coming before Remy’s back straightened to declare the truth in stone.
“Torpedoes in the water!” he said. “Multiple high-speed screws. Too many to count.”
Jake couldn’t remember an equaled look of terror in the guru’s face. He leapt from his seat and yelled as he darted to the conning platform.
“All ahead flank, cavitate! Maintain course one-nine-zero. I’m evading to the south. Lieutenant Santos, mark datum! Make sure we know exactly where we are right now!”
“Datum is marked,” Santos said. “Should we launch countermeasures?”
“No, it’s way too soon,” Jake said.
The Wraith’s acceleration shook its circular ribs.
“Henri, flood the communications buoy and then cut it. We don’t need it us slowing us down.”
Henri acknowledged the order and turned to his panel to carry it out.
“Antoine, can you track all the torpedoes?” Jake asked.
“Not a chance!”
“Can you rule out the ones that are drawing wide and track the rest?”
“No! There are too many! Every ship in that task force just unloaded its arsenal!”
“Okay,” Jake said. “We don’t need your listening expertise anymore. Anything that can kill us is loud enough to see visually on Subtics, right?”
“Well, yes?”
“Subtics has a mode where it can auto-identify targets based upon a signal-to-noise ratio threshold, right?”
“It’s a dangerous mode!” Remy said. “It creates too many false targets.”
“So what? Do it. Then you, Durand, and Santos go through and sift out the false targets. Got it?”
“This is something we’ve never practiced!”
“You have a better idea?”
“No,” Remy said.
“Don’t worry about screwing it up. There’s nothing you can do pressing buttons on the tactical system to make this any worse.”
“Got it, Jake. I will try. Let’s go, guys!”
Below Jake, the navigation chart became a portending of inescapable doom. Forty-one flashing red inverted triangles appeared near the locus of fleeing warships. Automated subscripted numbers allowed him to count them.
“Forty-one, Antoine? That’s impossible. That’s more than they have.”
“I warned you about false targets.”
“Start by listening to the most dangerous ones and rule them in or out as real weapons. I’m going to gray out the ones that are drawing away, whether they’re real or false.”
Jake darted to the navigation display and tapped the red triangle with the subscripted number of forty-one, invoking a list of data by it. On the row depicting the range from the Wraith, three dashes indicated a critical gap in his knowledge. The speed row showed an educated guess of fifty-five knots, and the bearing to the torpedo read three-five-zero.
All the torpedoes would show bearings near the northwest, the direction of their launch platforms, and all would be moving at fifty-five knots. As he tracked them over time, he would make estimates of range and determine which ones vectored away and which ones came for him.
If the shooters knew his location and had aimed at him, he was dead. He hoped they had instead taken a blind buckshot approach. As seconds ticked away, the bearing lines to torpedo forty-one showed the weapon drifting right, vectoring behind him.
He exhaled as he grayed it out and focused on the other forty instruments of destruction. Checking the weapon beside it, he noticed that it also pointed aft of his stern. After he turned it gray, he checked and grayed a third.
“Antoine,” he said, “I think these are all shot in a nearly parallel formation, either that or slightly fanned out.”
“They didn’t start in a perfect line abreast. So they can’t be perfectly parallel. It’s more likely they are fanning out slightly. That’s how I would attack us if I were them.”
“That’s good,” Jake said. “We have a chance.”
Returning his gaze to the navigation display, he realized that relying on speed, maneuvering, and countermeasures to escape the torpedoes would end his life. Survival required something unusual to reveal itself to him.
It did.
The Second Thomas Shoal provided storm protection to local fishermen. As he admired its long, teardrop shape, he noticed that it tapered to a southern tip. And though the shallow western shoals were impassable, he saw haven on the eastern side, where the Sierra Madre had passed decades ago before beaching at the northwest tip of a sunken lagoon.
“We make for the other side of the shoal,” he said.
He walked dividers across the chart and calculated.
“We’re three and a half miles from the southern edge,” he said. “We’re making twenty-six knots. I need eight minutes and twenty seconds to turn the corner. Are we going to be alive that long, Antoine?”